Category Archives: troubleshooting

OverviewOver the years, I’ve found a common reason for blogging is not only to share information with others, but also to help yourself when enough days have passed that you’ve forgotten your own advice. In my role as a Domain/Practice Lead in our Support organization, there are certain posts of mine that I frequently refer people to as well as find myself using in the field.

With that in mind, here’s a list of some of my most commonly referenced posts, along with reasons why they’ve proven useful:

Note: Like having a resource for Exchange troubleshooting tips? I’d also recommend the Exchange Server Troubleshooting Companion that Paul Cunningham and I wrote. You’ll likely find many of these within it as well.

Info: Active Directory and DNS issues are one of the most common Exchange support issues. When Exchange is having service startup issues or random failures, it’s useful to be able to utilize Event Viewer to determine if Exchange is properly able to access the Global Catalog servers in the environment.

Info: The most useful piece of information from this post (aside from explaining the differences between SMTP Relay and Submit) is the below command I frequently use to check for Receive Connectors that have been configured as an Open Relay:

Info: With Exchange 2013, it became extremely important to ensure you were running on the appropriate (and supported) version of .NET Framework. A quick method to determine this (given to me by my good friend and fellow Exchange MCM Mark Henderson) is to use the below command to pull the currently installed .NET version, then compare it to the versions listed in the post:

Info: Probably my most commonly referenced topic when it comes to Exchange networking; IPv6. Microsoft’s statement is fairly simple when it comes to IPv6 (this goes for every product line), they perform zero testing or validation on Windows with IPv6 disabled. Simply put, good luck with disabling it. The point of my post is that should you choose to disable it, do it via the registry and NOT just unchecking it on the NIC.

Info: Transport Agents are a common cause of mail flow issues with Exchange, at least when they’re misbehaving. At the very least, know how to utilize the “Get-TransportAgent” command and what each Transport Agent does, especially the third-party agents.

Info: This is a fairly common issue with Exchange 2013 (though technically the GUI should now prevent this issue from happening) where two different Exchange Transport services could end up listening on the same port number and causing issues

Info: Working for a hardware vendor, I spent a lot of my time helping customers with their storage solutions for Exchange. I commonly get pulled into Exchange Calculator or Jetstress escalations and this post has become a very useful reference for explaining the importance Controller Caching, even when using an Exchange JBOD architecture.

Info: I could retire if I had a dollar for every hour I’ve spent helping customers overcome corruption issues with Exchange, usually the result of running an ESEUTIL /p and not vacating the database afterwards. This is a great reference I like to send customers and frontline phone agents which describes how to recover from such corruption.

Info: In past conferences like IT Dev Connections, I’ve said that CPU overcomittment and the resulting contention is THE most common Exchange Virtualization support issue I encounter. This is a great article to send to someone who is struggling to understand how CPU overcomittment works and still somehow thinks that virtualization is just magic, where you can give a VM as many resources as you want and it will just work 🙂

Info: These articles are great references when attempting to explain or understand Exchange Transaction logging. This topic is important to understand when working with Exchange Backups, DAG log shipping, and HA recovery.

Info: A common issue when attempting to delete an Exchange Mailbox Database (typically the first one which was created by the system). The important commands to remember from this post are the following:

Info: Going back to my previous statement about improper DNS settings being one of the most common causes of Exchange issues, this post discusses the impact NIC DNS settings can have on an Exchange Server.

Intro: I honestly didn’t expect this to be a popular post, but oddly enough, the topic of Dynamic Distribution Lists is a very common one on the forums. While the issue I experienced wasn’t extremely common on its own, the explanations within the post about how DDL’s work has become a common point of reference.

Info: Having spent a lot of time working with small businesses and SBS, I wrote this post hoping to shine a light on the benefits of the Essentials Office 365 integration tools and how they’re a great alternative to using Directory Synchronization for small businesses. I tend to send this link to customers and colleagues once a month as I’ve found most people don’t even know what Essentials is.